The need to recycle our disposable goods to conserve our natural resources has come to the forefront in the last decade. The great challenge in this effort is to reduce the cost of the recycling so that it is more or at least as economical to recycle as it is to produce the same product from raw materials. One type of goods for which the recycling effort has been successful is the recycling of paper products to reduce the number of trees that must be cut down to produce paper products. This effort to recycle paper comes at a time when the amount of paper products produced and disposed of in the United States, per capita, is increasing.
One paper product which has been found to be ameniable to recycling is paper such as is used in newspapers, magazines, etc. For this reason many communities have undertaken special efforts to collect used paper, including such special efforts as having days set aside in which such paper is picked up at residences separate from the general trash.
Paper from books can also be recycled. However, unlike newspapers and other loose papers which can be recycled without any initial preparation, in recycling books, the first step that must be completed is the removal of the binding from the pages. The binding must be removed first for this reason. When paper is recycled, the ink already printed on the pages must be removed. To accomplish this removal, the paper is put in a special chemical bath that separates and removes the ink. However, when the books are bound, glue is applied to the edges of the pages that are bound together. This glue, if allowed to mix in with the chemicals that are used to remove ink from the pages, disrupts the removal of the ink and thus the recycling effort. It is thus imperative that the binding of books be seperated from the pages of books if the books are to by recycled.
Currently, there are machines in use which perform this function of removing the bindings from books. Some of these machines use band saws to cut the bindings off. However, using band saws is a slow process that creates a relatively unsafe and uncomfortable working environment due to the dust created and the relatively high exposure to injury for the operator of the machines.
Another prior art machine is designed with two cutting blades that are in parallel planes and rub against each other as the blades are brought side-to-side, much like a giant pair of scissors. This machine is also relatively slow and involves a lot of down time as the machine must be finely tuned so that the blades have the correct tolerances with respect to each other.
Thus, it is apparent from the above that there exists a need in the art for a machine which can quickly and efficiently slice the bindings off books without exposing the operators of the machine to unnecessarty risks and without generating a lot of dust.
This invention fulfills this need, along with other needs apparent to the skilled artisan once given the following disclosure: